Habitual skeptic

Category Archives: Media

Money is a dirty word in the liberty movement. Ironic, for a pro-free-market and free trade ideology. But when theory becomes reality, many recoil at the idea of bloggers doing sales or advertising. Why?

Spending time to make content or technology means taking time away from other activities, whether business or leisure. That time has to be compensated. Yet some act like entitled socialists, expecting this work to be provided for free!

To be fair, some monetization strategies are obnoxious or spammy. But all that means is we need better monetization options. Better technologies. Better feedback and suggestion from audiences of what works and what doesn’t.

For the liberty movement to survive, much less thrive and change the world, it must be economically self-sufficient. If you can’t feed yourself, you can’t change the world. If our activities in pursuit of liberty are not profitable, but only financial drains, we will never grow and advance.

We need more business models around advancing liberty. We need more content, more media platforms, more technologies. With the fake news media collapsing before our eyes, there has never been a better opportunity than now. There is so much pent up demand and very little supply.

We need more liberty entrepreneurs.

Not just from an economic perspective, but from a psychological one as well. It can get depressing focusing only on what the poweful are doing to us. Who wants to be on a constantly losing team, with a victim mentality? It’s time we recognize our own power, take responsibility, and become agents of change.

I am working on several media technology projects with a group of liberty-minded developers and creators. Want to join the effort? Email me at apollo at apolloslater dot com and let’s get to work!

It is an auspicious time for independent media. The Fake Media’s “fake news” hysteria has capped off this year’s apotheosis of undisguised propaganda. Now we learn that the US government will directly fund domestic pro-government propaganda in the press and on social media, with $160 million. Let me explain why this is amazing news for independent media.

The media world has supply and demand, just like any other market. There is a demand out there for real information and it is up to the media to satisfy that demand. The more the media avoid this, and publish lies and hoaxes instead, the more business opportunity there is to fill the void. This is how Fox News became such a cable news powerhouse. Due to the “fake news” hysteria, the big platforms Facebook, Google, and Twitter are censoring alternative voices. This creates an opportunity for a Fox News of social media (perhaps many!).

The government’s funding of propaganda reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of media. It is treating the internet as an “enemy weapons system“. But media consumption is not a win-lose, zero-sum game. All this does is crowd out existing journalism and reduces the supply of real information. But the demand remains the same. That means there is now an even greater business opportunity for free speech advocates than before.

We have a real, tangible, action plan to dismantle the establishment’s hold on power: Start new media platforms and especially new media technologies. Let us create independent media content, independent social networks, independent ad networks, independent video sharing, … independent everything! The opportunities are boundless. I myself am working with a group on such a project in the media tech space. If you are interested in learning more about our effort, please email me at apollo at apolloslater dot com.

This post is an edited collection of my responses to James Corbett’s presentation on the social bookmarking site Steemit.

A new social bookmarking site, Steemit, has been taking off recently, in libertarian and anarchist circles, promising decentralized, uncontrolled publishing via blockchain technology. However, on closer analysis, Steemit does not look decentralized at all. It looks like a standard social bookmarking site, with the added feature of paying for tokens to increase your post/comment ranking. It seems like interest groups with deep pockets could easily game the ranking system, moreso than other sites. In fact, this operation seems more like a scheme to sell digital currency than a publishing platform.

As for the blockchain, besides the nice buzzword, I’m not sure what it solves in terms of preventing censorship, besides providing a public cache. This function is performed now by image-hosting sites, private websites, archive.org, as well as the social network platforms themselves. The big problem is discovery and ranking, how people actually communicate and find out about stuff, which Steemit is still very vulnerable to.

It’s very odd that Steemit requires a Facebook or Reddit account to function, with plans to add SMS verification, but no stated plans to remove these restrictions. I’m not sure what permissions they ask for, since I haven’t signed up, but it certainly opens the possibility of those social networks reading your Steemit posts and punishing you on their platform. In any case, it’s a big hint that this is not a decentralized system and is doubly strange because most platforms do not have such a restrictive requirement. A truly decentralized system would not have a spam/fake account problem, except as DDoS, since it would not rely on a central index.

Steemit does not look like any better of a solution than Facebook or Twitter at this point, except to the extent that you trust the people running it more. The links to the User Agreement and Privacy Policy are broken and there is no ownership information about the company on their website. Caution!

There’s been a lot of talk recently about Facebook and Twitter censoring conservative and libertarian groups and personalities, such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Lauren Southern. While this is undoubtedly true in many specific instances, how big of an issue is this overall?

One thing we can look at is the number of left- or right-leaning groups. I did a quick search for Facebook groups containing popular political keywords. It seems that the right-wing is much more active, at least measured by number of groups:

Republican

141

Democrat

108

Conservative

178

Progressive

112

Libertarian

103

Socialist

93

Caveats:

I used Facebook’s Graph API to conduct searches. You may get different results using the browser or app search.

These are only the most popular keywords, but there are many more specific keywords, with more groups.

These numbers do not reflect group membership counts or engagement levels. Perhaps that’s a future post!